ROUND TABLE OF SUPERINTENDENTS IN CITIES WITH A POPULATION OF OVER 300,000

TOPIC: THE FUNCTION OF THE SCHOOL TO THE COMMUNITY IT SERVES

A. ITS SCHOLASTIC FUNCTION

J. M. GWINN, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, NEW ORLEANS, LA.

One is in danger of being considered at least a bit old-fashioned, if not antiquated, if he holds that scholarship should be a leading function of the school today. Scholarship, except possibly in the inaugural address of some college president, seems to have fallen into disrepute. Why this seeming indifference to, and neglect of, scholarship?

In the first place, it is due to the reaction against the useless, impractical, and dearly purchased scholarship of the past. The value of knowledge for scholarship, in the past, seemed to vary inversely with its value in practical living, and directly with its difficulty of acquirement. The pedantic college professor in his threadbare coat and with his visionary and bookish notions, which he thanks God nobody can use, has become the symbol of scholarship, while the college and high-school graduate, floundering and failing in practical affairs, is compared unfavorably with the self-made young man who has learned the way of success in the hard school of experience.

Secondly, we are, today, living in a practical, money-making age. Pragmatism, with its emphasis on results, seems to be the dominant philosophy, which philosophy, interpreted by the modern business man, means sales and contracts, dollars and cents. The big thing today is the reward, the dollar, and it is paid for practice, and not for the theory and training behind the practice. This emphasis on, and the rewarding of, results has deceived the less thoughtful into believing that practice is all-important and that theory and scholarship are useless.

Again, our abounding egotism and self-complacency, bolstered up by the knowledge of the marvelous material development made possible thru the no less wonderful inventions and discoveries of today, have almost caused us to believe that we are self-made and selfsufficient. Our egotism seems to have made some forget that our splendid triumphs are but the flowering of the toil-achieved experiences of other days.

In the fourth place, the development of democracy seems to have decreased the love of scholarship. The scholarship of the past has always flourished as a child of the court and aristocracy. Scholarship and pride of ancestry go hand in hand. In a democracy, the man is esteemed for what he is and not for his ancestry. Aristocracy and all its kin are despised. So, scholarship, in a democracy, may fall into disrepute.

Finally, we are in a great hurry today. We must arrive and that quickly. This demand for speedy, even for instantaneous, results, coupled with our American delight in being buncoed, has made us easy victims to all get-education-quick schemes.

For these, and for other reasons which time forbids to mention, scholarship as a function of the school has become, for many, discredited and neglected and a halfforgotten tradition. A careful examination of the facts, however, clearly shows that scholarship as a function of the school is in no danger of being abandoned. This examination, nevertheless, reveals the fact that the conception of what scholarship is and how it is acquired is undergoing serious modifications. The old divorced-from-practical-life, narrow in content, and disciplinary conception of scholarship has passed. The fine gentleman of leisure as an ideal has made way for the toil-marked captain of industry or master of finance. With this changed ideal, the old notion that the work of the world could be done by the untrained and ignorant has gone and now the work of the world demands knowledge, superior skill, and training. In this way, has come the demand that the school and scholarship join themselves to vocation and practical living. The field of

human experience has widened tremendously during the past century. With the coming of the sciences, Spencer raised the question concerning the relative worth of knowledge. Much more do we need to raise that question today. The widening of the fields of human experience has produced multiplicity of courses of study and wide election of subjects. Scholarship is no longer bound to Latin, Greek, and mathematics, nor yet to any one or to all of the newer subjects. Scholarship has lost its definiteness in content till now it is more appropriate to speak of scholarships rather than of scholarship, for the scholarship of one scholar will be quite different from that of another. With President Eliot, we must agree that scholarship cannot now imply a knowledge of everything, nor even a little knowledge of everything, but, rather, a general knowledge of some things and a real mastery of a small portion of the field of human experience. In the last place, the changed attitude toward, if not the complete breakdown of, the dogma of formal discipline has contributed largely to the spread of scholarship to other than the traditional subjects.

It is difficult, therefore, to define scholarship in any very definite way. There are, however, certain ways of looking at scholarship which may aid in reading meaning into the term. It may be viewed as dynamic and as static. Scholarship, dynamic, works out toward others in social ways, yes, as vocation even into the economic field. Scholarship, viewed as static, implies the possession of certain knowledge which varies with the position and nature of the individual and the surrounding social needs. It also implies certain attitudes of mind and ways of reacting due to the training in the school. The more homogeneous a country is, the greater the core of knowledge in common, the more diversified, the smaller the core of common knowledge and the greater the marginal differences.

Whatever aim is set as the principal function of the school, all concede that school education at first must devote much time and energy to the technique of human experience. The child must be trained in the use of the processes thru which experience is acquired and be given possession of, and skill in using, the forms which society has invented for the preservation and communication of its experience. The technique of reading, writing, mathematics, grammar, literature, geography, history, science, art, and industry must be taught. The emphasis on form quite naturally caused a neglect of content and often inappropriate and useless and even silly subject-matter formed the basis for lessons on forms. Modern pedagogy has greatly improved the method of teaching this technique, and social demands have forced a practically useful content as the basis of form studies. It has also been found that much of the technique can be acquired incidentally when the aim, for the child at least, is content. The insistent demand today is for both useful and interesting subject-matter. The extent to which the demand for useful content has gone is well represented in the suggestion recently made by a prominent psychologist that the first sentence in the first reader should be "This is a toothbrush."

Practically the same causes which dethroned Latin, Greek, and mathematics as the only bearers of scholarship have robbed the three R's of some of their prestige as instruments of education and have brought rival subjects into the elementary curriculum. A great contest is going on here. The complexity of modern life has brought the advantage to the broader elementary course.

The demand for useful content has powerfully tended to localize subject-matter, for what is useful in Boston may be of little use in San Francisco, and the most valuable experiences in Chicago may be positively hurtful in New Orleans. The makers of elementary textbooks can no longer hope to produce books that will find sale thruout the country. The elementary textbooks of the future either will be locally produced, or more general texts will be used with local supplements. The community which a school serves is demanding that the elementary school should lead the child into its local heritage.

After the school has given the child control of the elementary tools of human experience, its second great scholastic function is that of scholarship. As stated before, there is a strong movement in some quarters to decrease greatly, if not to eliminate, this function

of the school and to plant vocational education immediately upon that of the grammar school, if not upon the primary school. We are now urged to have vocational education begin at the early age of three, when the child should receive training in the vocation of caring for its personal needs. This is doubtless sound education, but vocational education in the sense of education directly aimed at preparing one for the occupation thru which he will earn his living should certainly be postponed to a much later age, for vocation tends to fix habits and produce immobility. The capacities of the child, the economic and social position of the family, and the kind of work the community needs to have done will determine the beginning-point of vocational education.

All attempts to eliminate scholarship as a function of the school are doomed to fail. No matter how broad one's personal experience may be the requirements of modern society demand knowledge far greater. A genius might succeed without the assistance of the past and help of others, but the great host of common mortals would fail and find themselves no better off than their primitive ancestors guided by instincts. Each individual must be given that portion of human experience which will be of most service to him in making a life and in earning a living. The school must transmit this heritage to the child if it serves the purpose for which it was created. This heritage must be transmitted for the following, briefly stated reasons:

1. It is the great interpreter of the present and prophet of the future. All right adjustments of the individual to his environment are conditioned on his having possession of it.

2. It is the great conserving force in social progress. Without it, the advances of the radical element of society would be lost and future progress would become impossible. 3. It saves the individual from being overthrown by temporary storms. It is like ballast to the ship that holds it steady when surface waves toss in fury. The tango is not going to wreck society.

4. It is the foundation of all truly practical education. The material conquests of the age took their rise in the fountains of science and higher mathematics. President Wilson is a great living example of the value of scholarship in practical affairs.

5. It prepares one to rightly use his hours of leisure and saves him from the dangers of his non-vocational hours. Emphasis on vocation has made some forget the shortened hours of labor and the need for education for man's non-working hours. The migration toward the devil comes when man is not at work.

6. It saves one from repeating the mistakes of others and enables him to profit by their successes. It frees the individual immeasurably. One can

7. It makes one at home in the world and teaches the kinship of the race. work most effectively and live most happily when he is at home.

While yielding to the demand for practical education and to the pressure and popularity of vocational training, the school must hold aloft the banner of scholarship and culture and stand for the drill necessary to the learning of the technique of experience. Yet not for the monotonous grind on mere form nor for the scholarship represented by the dry bones of the past, but for technique made interesting and profitable by rich content, and for the new scholarship which at once mingles the blue blood of ancestral aristocracy with the red blood of horny-handed democracy.

B. ITS SOCIAL FUNCTION

JAMES M. GREENWOOD, ADVISORY SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, KANSAS CITY, MO. I shall treat this subject under three types of mind for the sake of clearness and differentiation of educational engineering in a community.

1. The "rushers" and "can't-waits."—Each pair of lungs of this class is now on a platform in person or by proxy, trying to get his opinions listened to on what public education, fits, misfits, and unfits should undertake to do for those in school, and also for some seventy-five millions of people out of school. If each one of these would shut his mouth and not open it again until his contriving faculty has devised some scheme worth

listening to, the country at large would be an immense gainer thereby. That would give time for a breathing spell and to cast about and determine what could actually be done that is worth doing. The Americans have before them a terrible task to be disposed of in some fashion; so immense in itself, so swift and needful and impressive is the business, that effective blows must be struck at once to prevent a collapse. We are told that the laws of the universe, of which the schoolhouse as a social center is not an exact transcript, need amendments immediately and that something must be done to attract the applause of magazine writers and other purveyors of public intelligence. The question is: Shall we be ruled by wisdom and foresight, or by folly and hindsight?

Verily, a new epoch in modern civilization is hurled upon us, out of which we are vainly looking for a new order of stable intelligence to be developed and placed approvingly on the stage of human affairs. This is a bread-of-life theory on this whirling ball. It is affirmed that this educational mill has a hopper wide enough, high enough, and big enough to take in all the grists, human and otherwise, that can be garnered under the plea of present necessity and just legislation. We hear vocal explosions which are volcanic, sulphuric, oily, insistent, acrobatic, and otherwise, and let us be thankful that the damage is no worse. I dare say many of these promoters are brave men after their sort, made, it must be confessed, mostly out of shoddy brain-stuff of which there is much evidence. Logically, their theory of the "socialized schoolhouse" and the concomitants thereof leads to a brewing and an overflow of poisonous waters that will submerge the ideal, honest, spiritual life of the American nation.

Altho it is an evidence of righteous living to affirm that honored age never had any shadow of a noble belief about the world or could have engaged in any profitable activity connected with it prior to about 1914 A.D., there are yet some solid rules of living, thinking, and acting in some homes; some notions that our fathers and mothers cherished that still pulsate in the blood of their descendants. Some people still believe that the spiritual should originate the practical, and that it is a sad commentary when the practical of a low condition externally dominates the internal soul action-even the body as well as the garment of the spiritual. Beautiful prize oxen, horses, hogs, dogs, mental and moral degenerates these are the ideals in that Utopia land we must bow down to and worship under this cult or that. The one who would cultivate his soul and think, even on a secondary plane, is reduced to the sad necessity of finding God in a cow barn, a swill tub, or a hencoop, in a cheap novelty performance, or in a round of giddy pleasure that surfeits and passes away, leaving dross in character as the national sediment to be capitalized.

2. The "stand-stillers."-The "under-do-its" are never quite so ridiculous as the "over-do-its." They see clearly in a very circumscribed range what is actually occurring, and they stand firmly to the faith of "what has been." They are not altogether a bad element in a community. Their mission is to keep the Pegasuses from slopping over when riding their hobby horses thru the air at public expense. This social life that is flaunted to every breeeze, they fear, is becoming overorganized and getting top-heavy, a sort of windbag bobbing up and down and around in the air.

Too many organized functions for the healthy stability of even small communities, and the needless multiplication of entertainments, amusements, compulsory attendance at functions that deplete pocketbooks, bankrupt morals, paralyze intellectual activity, and turn life into a whirligig of silly pleasure, are the specters that the "stand-stillers" view with horror. All these amusements when sifted down to the bottom reveal a promoter whose patriotic ambition is to procure money for some cause in which he is deeply interested. He sugar-coats it as a benevolent enterprise for the amusement, enlightenment, moral and social betterment of tired, overworked, and careworn members of the community. The organization needing assistance may be worthy, and, as this is the easist way of raising the revenue, the public is taxed to support it.

The "stand-stillers" see that the patient "public-ox" is being taxed enormously for what is most frequently poor stuff in any market. Beside this there is a heavy and con

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stant drain on the slender resources of those who can ill afford it, which oftentimes interferes with their regular work to such an extent as to create financial embarrassment of a serious nature. The entertainments are projected too often upon the theory of competition with the five- and ten-cent "moving-picture shows." It is the indiscriminate use of schoolhouses for regular "show-business" that the "stand-stillers" object to. They do not object to teachers' and parents' meetings, debates, declamatory contests, spelling matches, and such like public gatherings at the schoolhouses as have always been in vogue in this country since the schoolhouse was first built at the crossroads in the unorganized school district. They favor discussions of big subjects but object to sticking picture diagrams on sex hygiene on every blackboard. The "stand-stillers" look at flashy movements in a distrustful way, because they fail to see any strong indication of the development of either substantial mental or moral habits that will make national fiber. To them it is a spineless and nerveless business that ends in the human scrap-heap, showing no efforts of how to trim either thought or action for definite plans of life.

3. "Both-way lookers."-There is perhaps no other nation on the earth whose level of general intelligence is higher than is ours, but the most superficial investigation in the most enlightened communities will convince any patient observer that many gross and absurd notions respecting many common but important subjects connected with human welfare and intellectual and moral advancement are prevalent, and are not understood except by very few persons.

It would be an interesting investigation if a competent commission in each center of population in this country would undertake to determine what percentage of the population is really enlightened-how many of our people prosecute rational pursuits for their own sake and from a pure love of knowledge, independent of that specific information requisite for practicing a vocation. After making all legitimate deductions from the mass in the aggregate, the great problem is that of the general diffusion of useful knowledge among all classes of people. The higher and more humanitarian view then is that the intellectual and moral faculties of man should be directed to the pursuit of objects worthy of the dignity of an enlightened manhood. Here is the great field for uplifting each community. A general uplift can be effected only thru a conviction of the importance of a better understanding of common and higher things. When these notions are deeply impressed on the minds of the most intelligent and influential class of citizens in a community and move to action, then something valuable can be accomplished.

Such a diffusion of knowledge among the masses would dissipate many crude notions concerning common things, would foster health and prevent accidents, would prepare many for making proper and correct observations on the facts of the various sciences, would place enjoyments on a high level, would inculcate a tendency to promote the comfort of society, would give enlarged views of the beautiful in art, literature, music, the drama, and architecture; would make possible the general utility of knowledge in relation to man's moral, physical, and intellectual endowments, and a proper estimate of human life and its possibilities and problems. In addition to all these advantages, the way would be opened for gathering and organizing information on all the larger world problems now occupying the attention of the most thoughtful and benevolent members of the human race in all quarters of the globe.

Except in rare cases, the evening work at the schools should not be for the children in attendance at the day schools, but should be serious work for grown people, who seek enlightenment and entertainment rather than amusement in picture shows and vaudeville performances of a low quality. Those who go to such places are among the better informed and cultured people. Lectures on travel, science, literature, manufacturing, industries, transportation, and other problems, properly illustrated, are the most beneficial to thoughtful people. Persons who can tell of journeys and experiences in foreign countries, or those who are making, or have made, new contributions to any department of knowledge are